Commissioner Tagliabue Press Conference – Pittsburgh 10/31/01
In terms of general
interest, the two things we did this morning was the CBA and some discussion
about our Super Bowl planning for the game coming up in New Orleans.
On the CBA, we approved the extension of
the system with some changes that takes the cap through 2006, the Draft
through 2008 and the un-capped year would be 2007. Some of the key changes
are: increased minimum salaries for veteran players and then we have some
new terms, with certain categories of veteran players playing at the minimum
salary. We have a cap-friendly feature, that is where the cap-count is less
than the player’s salary, then we treat the difference between the salary
and the cap-count as a benefit cost under the total cap, allocated equally
among all of the teams.
There are major improvements in player benefits: insurance, tuition reimbursement, and other areas. Over time, these will represent significant increased costs to the clubs, but significant enhanced benefits to the players. There is also a performance-based pay element where over time we’ll be creating a pool, could be $3 million a club or more, annually, where veteran players would be getting performance-based bonuses based on downs played and other objective criteria. We have a task force working with the union to determine who will be the qualifying players and what will be the objective standards for performance-based pay going to certain categories of players.
I spoke yesterday several times with Gene
Upshaw about the current environment in terms of the September 11th attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fact that, as one example
of these effects, we had to re-schedule week 2 games and move the Super
Bowl. If there were any kind of a repetition, either this year or in future
years, where we had to cancel games, or cancel a week under circumstances
where we couldn’t reschedule, then we need to have some understandings with
the Players Association as to how we are going to treat player salaries,
player costs and lost revenues in that kind of a situation. Dan Rooney,
Harold Henderson and I spoke with Gene last week about these and related
matters and I’m sure we’ll get it worked out, hopefully in the next several
weeks.
The other issue was the
Super Bowl and I’m going to be in New Orleans this weekend for a range on
meetings on Sunday and Monday with the Governor, the Mayor and others,
including Tom Benson. Basically, in addition to a lot of detailed planning,
we are looking at three things in terms of our approach to the Super Bowl
this year.
Number one is to make
certain that the character and content of the entire week take account of
where the nation is right now. Some elements of our activities which have
been community based and focused on local charities will also extend to
disaster relief funds and recognition of military, firefighters and police
around the nation who have helped with the aftermath of the events of
September 11th. The character and content of the week, including the kinds
of music we have, the groups we have and the events we have, will be
restructured.
The second thing is the
state of Louisiana will be more heavily involved than in the past, in terms
of the planning process and in terms of the participation by the Governor,
his staff and other elements of state agencies so that we can use the
resources of the state and not just the resources of a city and Jefferson
parish in making the game a success.
The third thing is that we have taken a
hard look at the venues in New Orleans and tried to define some very
clear-cut venues and focus our activities on those clearly defined venues.
For example, one venue is the Superdome itself plus the Sports Arena, which
is adjacent. We are looking at that as one venue. A second venue is the
Convention Center and some open-air space adjacent to the Convention Center
where we in all likelihood would have the NFL Experience. The third venue
for these purposes would be the Bourbon Street area, the restaurants and
other attractions of New Orleans so we can focus fans activities in those
venues. We can focus the entertainment in those clearly defined venues,
probably produce less travel and more convenience for the fans attending the
game and participating in the Friday night events, Saturday night events,
NFL Experience, pre-game events and also give us the ability to assure
tremendous security around those events.
Those were the major items
of general interest. We had other items such as the approval of the
league’s support of the Arizona stadium project. We continued discussion of
the Arena League; we informed the clubs of our plans for going forward with
NFL Europe this Spring; we’re continuing with the player-allocation plan
that was approved last year which ended up to be a sound stocking plan with
real good players given the opportunity to play in Europe. We had excellent
football over there and a very successful season and we are going to
continue that. We had all of the NFL Europe coaches in our offices about
two or three weeks ago for several days of meeting with John Beake, who is
head of football operations for Europe. John and others in our office are
going to Europe this weekend for another week of planning over there, so we
are looking forward to getting that done in a high quality way.
Q: Did you vote on NFL
Europe?
Commissioner:
NFL Europe is approved
through 2003. We have the support from the Players Association in place now
through 2006, which is significant support. Arrangements in terms of player
benefits – insurance coverage for the players, injury protection, all that
-- remain in place, but we did not vote. Most of the interest was in the
player allocation plan, which will continue this year.
Q: Is the shared cost of
security a major obstacle with the players?
Commissioner: The sharing of the cost of the security is the least of the open issues. I think we’ll get all of this worked out, but the major focus would be on two areas. One would be if we have game cancellations at any time going forward this season or future seasons right through 2006, how would we handle that in terms of the cap and how would we adjust the whole system so there is an equitable sharing of the “pain” in terms of financial loss? The second thing would be how we deal with television revenue in 2006, which is the final capped year, in light of the fact that our current TV contracts only go through 2005. If the national economy continues to be in a recession because of the September 11 attacks and subsequent developments, or another negative state in terms of our business, that is television advertising, we may have to look at flatter TV revenues in 2006 and beyond. We might have to make some adjustments in our expectations as to how the cap would grow and how benefits would grow through the remainder of the decade, assuming there was another extension of the system. Those are two major areas of discussion with Gene and his people and I think we’ll get it resolved; it’s just going to take some time to sort through the different variables and scenarios.
Q: Is the Players
Association willing to pay for some of the extra security?
Commissioner:
Yes, they are amenable to
the sharing of additional security costs. Obviously, the whole league is
focusing on this as a priority, including the Players Association and the
players. The players have been quite vocal about the fans being safe, air
travel being safe, facilities being safe and secure. We know we are dealing
with a new world. To do it right, there will be additional costs and that
is going to be an additional cost factor in the whole system.
Q: Since you can charge
anything you want for Super Bowl tickets, could you raise those prices to
help pay for security costs?
Commissioner:
No, I don’t think we can
charge anything for Super Bowl tickets. I think there is a limit on what
anybody can charge for any product and particularly in an environment, as we
have seen from our own retailing businesses, where consumer confidence is
influenced by a whole slew of factors, including the safety of air travel
and so on. I think we have to be very sensible in terms of our pricing of
the postseason, not just the Super Bowl – the Super Bowl ticket pricing is
already set. Our post-season pricing is not set and we are going to take
the current situation into account and maybe moderate our post-season
compared to prior years because we are in a different environment. Those
are issues we are going to be addressing ahead and the teams, I’m sure, are
going to have to look at that for next years’ ticket pricing.
Q: Will this be the most
secure Super Bowl ever?
Commissioner:
Yes. This will be the most
secure game ever played in the history of the league.
Q: On Super Bowl
security…
Commissioner:
Many of the things we have
been doing all season in that area would be continued and that would include
extra emphasis on securing the Superdome and the Sports Arena area well in
advance of the game, certainly weeks, if not months in advance of the game –
using technology to assist in that process of securing that zone and a lot
of good security is invisible and some would be visible. The main thing
would be very tight security at the Superdome and the adjacent areas (the
Sports Arena and Convention Center) would begin well in advance of the game
in December if not earlier.
Q: Will you cut back
some of the Super Bowl events?
Commissioner: I don’t currently see us scaling back any events. I see us redefining events and changing content, changing character. We’ve had discussions with more classical orchestra type groups both in the southeast and from around the nation. We have people working on the musical traditions of Louisiana, whether it’s jazz or Cajun. That’s a great part of the tradition, so there is a lot there and the nostalgia of New Orleans and the roots of a unique culture of that part of the country. We think that can make for a very rich weekend, which pays tribute to Americana and to the American spirit, which is a very creative, positive and diverse spirit, all of which is symbolized by jazz and other parts of our musical tradition. Those types of things we’re looking at, but scaling back is not part of our agenda.
Q: On the Houston stocking
plan...
Commissioner: We had a real good meeting and discussion this morning on the Houston stocking plan with the Management Council Executive Committee, myself and Bob McNair. Bob made a real good presentation and outlined his goals for the team, talked about the organization that he has put in place, including the football organization (Charlie Caserly, Dom Capers and Chris Palmer). Most of the conversation was about the current state of our CBA and our player system and the stocking plan in relation to that because under the stocking plan you can get players through the veteran player expansion draft, through free agency or players who have been released, and there have been more and more of those in recent years as part of players being released in February as part of squad planning. Then you can get players through the college draft. On the free agents and the released players, obviously you are competing with the other 31 teams but you have got a lot more cap room, so you have to anticipate where the cap is today, how it’s going to be next season, where it will be in the next two or three years and what will be the likely success pattern of the Texans in getting unrestricted free agents as well as other released free agents in competition with other teams. We agreed on a number of things such as in the veteran player allocation we were going to review the salaries of the kinds of players that would be put into the allocation so that it becomes a fair process for the Texans and not just a process where high salary players are on the list. That has to be monitored and we might have to make some changes there from the Cleveland plan given the growth of salaries. We also agreed to monitor it going forward. We have all seen the development of a football team is a year-by-year accretion if it’s going in the right way. We’ve seen that with existing teams like the Rams and the Ravens who were built incrementally over a relatively short period of time and became very strong teams and that obviously happened with the Browns with players like Quincy Morgan and other players coming in from the draft this year to compliment what they had previously and being big factors in the Browns beating the Ravens a few weeks ago. So, this is an ongoing process, not a one-year process. We agreed to monitor all those things and work closely with the Texans on that. We talked this morning about doing some more homework. We have had lot of meetings with Bob and Charley Caserly over the last several weeks. I met with Bob a few of weeks ago. Basically we said we would get back to them within the next couple of weeks and also get back to the Management Council Executive Committee with some further discussion and recommendations.
Q: Do changes have to
be voted on by all the clubs?
Commissioner: Depending on what we do it might be in the province of different people. I think there are some changes that I can make as the Commissioner. I think there some changes that the Management Council Executive Committee could make. And then there are probably some other things that would take a membership vote. We didn’t get into that this morning.
Q: On the Houston stocking
plan...
Commissioner: I don’t think we are going to go back to the Jacksonville and Carolina plan. There again, we had a good discussion with Bob and Jerry Jones and Mike Brown and John Shaw and other members of the committee. They talked about the fact that that the challenge is not to get to the playoffs or to a Conference Championship game in the second year and declare victory or declare unqualified success. The challenge is to build a competitive team and remain competitive over a period of years. Jerry Jones talked about the fact that if you can average out your success over time and always be a success maybe that is a little better than being 15-1 one year and then 1-15 eight or ten years later. Over time the teams that have enjoyed the greatest satisfaction in the NFL are the teams that are competitive year in and year out. So from that standpoint, Jacksonville has had more success over time than Carolina and some people feel it’s because they had more emphasis on younger players like Tony Bosselli coming in and some of the younger free agents they signed, including the trade for Mark Brunell. Carolina started with players like Sam Mills who gave them a big head start but were not too far from retirement. So we can’t adjust the plan to dictate an outcome but we can have a plan, the Cleveland plan seems to be working, with Butch Davis in the teams’ third season. Then it’s going to be up to the Texans to make it work and many people obviously feel that the stewardship of the Rams by John Shaw and Jay Zygmunt and Dick Vermeil and Mike Martz right now is the textbook case – building a team through a combination of drafted players like Orlando Pace, smart trades like the Marshall Faulk trade and some good luck like finding Kurt Warner. Q: More Houston
stocking plan…
Commissioner:
I told Bob about six months
ago that the way to approach this is to approach it within the framework of
where we are in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, not where we were in the mid-90’s
and not where we were in 1998 and 1999. This is a dynamic system which
changes all the time, in terms of the talent out there, in terms of the
amount of cap room, in terms of the amount of cap room used up by signing
bonuses and so on. To say that it’s the Cleveland plan, or
Carolina-Jacksonville plan is to start a kind of discussion where at some
point someone is going to say you are lucky you don’t have the Cincinnati
plan. In fact, Mike Brown said that today. Mike Brown said ‘I was in your
shoes about 30 years ago. I felt that the plan being proposed by the
American Football League wasn’t really that great and I told my father I was
going to write a letter to every owner in the AFL and the NFL, because the
merger had just been concluded, and tell them about all the injustices. I
wrote the letter and my father said he would predict how it was going to be
answered, and he was right and I was wrong. No one answered, no one called
and we got the plan we got and in the third year of our operations we were
in the playoffs. My dad said that is where we’ll be and not too long after
that we were a pretty good football team because Paul Brown was a pretty
good coach.’ So Mike said to try to sleep as well as you can and try to
work with us in terms of making sure we all do this thing right and that you
have a competitive and credible team, but it’s not Jacksonville, Carolina,
Cleveland or Cincinnati. Everything is very dynamic right now and that is
one of the fun parts of the league. Shapiro thought he had a Super Bowl
team in Washington and he doesn’t have that.
Q: On discussions with
network TV partners, including the possibility of rebates...
Commissioner:
We certainly have had
discussions with them about where we are in the contract cycle and we
certainly understand that we have got strong partnerships with all the
networks and we want to be fair, but they haven’t asked for rebates and we
aren’t considering rebates.
Q: On the Jacksonville
Super Bowl stadium renovation...
Commissioner:
The advantages of the
project (ALLTELL Stadium) are pretty clear, especially for the Jaguars and
Jaguars fans. There will be some good improvements made to ALLTELL stadium
in connection with the Super Bowl. Those improvements, including
escalators, will be there on a permanent basis so it will be a better
stadium for the fans and for the season ticket holders of the Jaguars. From
the league standpoint the ability to take the capacity for the game over
80,000 and create the extra 6,000 tickets that are part of the plan is a
good way to help the Jaguars and the city generate the revenue to pay for
the improvements. It’s a unique situation because there are not too many
stadiums where you can take the capacity up that large for a game. In that
instance it’s an option partly because they had planned for that for the
Georgia-Florida game. It seems like a win-win for everybody.
Q: On the current
season…
Commissioner:
What most people make of
the season is what usually has been the case in the NFL for many, many
years. If you build well piece by piece and then if you have some young
players blossom quickly and become factors you can become a winner. In
Cleveland’s case, I was there for the game against the Ravens two weeks ago,
the maturing of Tim Couch and players such as Quincy Morgan becoming part of
the receiving corps is part of what has given them a real good offense. On
defense they have strengthened themselves in some areas where they had to do
that. They had a pretty sensible plan, including high draft picks like
Gerard Warren. So it’s a process of growth that’s turning out to be sound
drafting and players clicking together and staying healthy. In the case of
the Bears, it’s a similar thing. The young receiver David Terrell had a
terrific game. We saw it the other night here in Pittsburgh with Plaxico
Burress having a breakout type game. So, it’s the drafting and the
blossoming of players not unlike what Dallas did in the early 90’s when all
of a sudden Michael Irvin, Alvin Harper, Emmitt Smith and Troy Aikman turned
out to be real solid draft picks, to put it mildly, and a team turns around
real fast. Whether it’s under the old system or this system the blossoming
of great young players who become factors (in the Bears’ case Brian Urlacher
on defense), it’s all coming together. It’s not rocket science. It’s good
football management, a little bit of luck, some intuition, and you start
winning. It’s not just the teams you’re playing and the schedule you have
because Cleveland beat the Ravens.
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